Great Interviews Don’t Equal Great Hires
We hope you enjoy reading this blog post!
Fermion is a Wollongong-based HR consultancy that specialises in helping companies across Australia save money through innovative recruitment and retention programs. Let us help your organisation thrive.
Why the traditional recruitment process keeps letting the wrong candidates through
“They interviewed well and their reference checks were excellent, but…”
This is a phrase we often hear from new clients after one or two of their own mishires.
A mishire is costly for everyone: the candidate is unhappy because the job didn’t work out and they must start again, and the business is unhappy for the same reason. It’s costly in terms of money, but also emotionally. A mishire is a terrible, yet preventable, outcome.
A poor selection process will pick good and bad candidates, but a good selection process will weed out the bad candidates while identifying good candidates. This is the difference and why sometimes the “interview & reference check” approach works, but it’s the costly mishires you need to avoid, and you do that by having a stepwise selection process that allows you to see different sides of the candidate.
A traditional recruitment process can still produce good hires, but it also lets the wrong ones through, and that’s the real cost.
The Interview Is the Least Reliable Predictor of Performance
Think about it. You’re sitting across from a stranger, a stranger who chose what went on their CV, selected their referees, rehearsed their answers and studied your company online.
They control the information and you react to it.
If your hiring process relies heavily on interviews and reference checks, you’re making high-stakes decisions with low-predictive tools.
And that’s where a stepwise process, one that incorporates psychometric testing, into the process is the game changer.
The Smarter Way to Recruit: Flip the order → improve the outcome
The small change that delivers dramatically better hiring decisions is simple:
- Screen candidates first
- Test second
- Interview last
By the time you get to the interview, the candidate is no longer a stranger, and you’re armed with data, behavioural insights, and context. That lets you ask sharper, more targeted questions and make significantly better decisions.
Modern Innovative Recruitment is About:
- A standardised and structured hiring process
- Screening and testing candidates before the interview
- It’s a two-way process; you are learning about the candidate and they are learning about you and your business.
- Only interviews good candidates
- Incorporate evidence-based psychometric tests that have high validity and reliability.
Small Changes, Big Results: The Tiny Tweaks That Transform Recruitment:
The small change that delivers dramatically better hiring decisions is simple:
- Screen candidates first
- Test second
- Interview last
About the Author:
Christopher Apps is an Organisational Psychologist and the owner of Fermion. He stays updated on the latest psychology research and shares evidence-based insights. The focus of Fermion is "Psychometric Testing for Recruitment" and “Recruitment to Retention: How to Select Good Staff & Keep Them”. If you would like to learn how to select good staff and keep them, please contact us at Fermion.
“Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.”
Eleanor Roosevelt.
